Coasting Page 8

  The scene is the quay at Peel, or Port Erin, or Laxey. A fisherman has just unloaded from his boat a shallow bucket full of crabs. All round the edge of the bucket the crabs are showing their claws and trying to scramble out. A comeover approaches the fisherman and tells him that he ought to get a bigger, taller bucket or he’ll lose half his crabs.

  “Nay,” the fisherman says. “Them’s all right. Them’s Manx crabs. As soon as one gets his leg cocked over the edge of bucket, t’others all gang together and drag him down again.”

  The story always ended in a wheezy burst of self-congratulatory laughter. To tell it at all was to demonstrate that you were a cynical Manx realist. It was a fine and flexible story. You could use it indiscriminately against Manxmen who talked about leaving the Island and going Across, against comeovers, against anyone who got ideas above his station, against anyone vain and ambitious enough to pursue an ideal of excellence which wasn’t recognized by the Island. The story in itself constituted a first-class argument for staying put and saying nowt. Either that, or be thought pretentious by the gang and get dragged back into the bucket. The tellers of the story always happily identified themselves with the gang.

  It was a comeover who told me that she disliked the Manx because they were so “provincial.” She was quite wrong. The Manx were not in the least provincial; they were profoundly insular—and the distinction is essential. Provincial is Flaubert’s rancorous little market towns aping last year’s Paris manner and last year’s Paris fashion; it is Chekhov’s rusticated sisters sighing for Moscow. The Manx aped no one else and they sighed for nowhere. Because visibility on the Irish Sea is usually rather poor, on nine days out of ten the Manx could see no other land except their own, and they managed to behave as if the outside world were an intermittent mirage, no more than the hallucination of Mount Skiddaw on a clear day.

  Propped up against the quay wall at Port St. Mary in my boat, with the tide out and another night falling, it was easy to become infected by the air of resentfulness, belittlement and claustrophobia that clung to the Island like its fogs. The floor yawned at a treacherous angle under my feet. T. E. Brown and Canon Stenning (“The pre-history of the Island may be summarised in brief …”) kept on sliding away across the saloon table. The oil lamps, tilting in their gimbals, were starting to blacken the ceiling of my tipsy room. Every sixty seconds the siren of Langness Lighthouse let off two long farts in the mist. I felt trapped like a crab in a bucket.

  It was difficult to keep awake in the darkened wheelhouse with the pinpoint of light monotonously picking out the same old numbers. I catnapped for minutes at a time, then snapped awake in panic, expecting to see the rusty plates and rivets of a cargo ship looming intimately overhead. But the sea stayed empty except for its charted ration of distant flashing lights. The mountainous coast of Wales showed faintly to the east—a ragged, blacker stain on a black satin sky.

  The wind started at about 2 A.M. First it was a friendly wind, blowing from behind me out of the northwest. It felt like a Force 3 on Admiral Beaufort’s scale:

  Large wavelets. Crests begin to break. Foam of glassy appearance. Perhaps scattered white horses.

  Yawning, I pottered out on deck to pull up sails. An hour later, I was pulling them down again because the boat was lurching, surging, corkscrewing before the wind. Clipped into a safety harness, I crouched in the bow with stray ropes flailing round my ears, trying to gather in the recalcitrant, banging mass of polyester. Fighting off a flock of angry swans is no fun at the best of times, and the bow of a small boat in a gathering sea is a horrible place to have to do it. It plummets under you, ten or fifteen feet at a time; you go down with it, but your stomach stays up somewhere over your head, and the swans keep on coming.

  It was too dark to see the shape of the sea; all that was visible were the streaks of phosphorescent white, arrowing away from the boat like lightning forks. The wind, I reckoned, must be close to a Force 7 now:

  Sea heaps up and white foam from breaking waves begins to be blown in streaks along the direction of the wind.

  The only sail I left up was the little triangular mizzen over the wheelhouse. Working like a rigid keel stuck up into the wind, it helped to steady the swoops and rolls as I plugged on under engine.

  Though the wind was blowing from behind, the tide was coming from in front, and the boat was making dismally slow progress over the ground. For an hour I watched the light on Bardsey Island, which seemed to have got stuck in the port shrouds, as the waves grew steadily bigger and more tightly packed. Inch by inch, the light shifted until it passed the shrouds and drew level with the wheelhouse.

  The dawn was gray and rainy. The sea was steep and fiercely corrugated, although the waves were not nearly so high as I had imagined them to be in the dark. When the boat struck them, one could feel its oak frame jar and recoil as if it had hit a ridge of concrete. Two miles off, the plump and rain-swept figure of Bardsey Island was wearing an unseasonable white skirt of spray.

  At dawn, Holyhead Coastguard came back over the VHF radio. The search for the South Stack was being resumed. The tone of the coastguard’s voice was different now, though. It had the routine flatness of no hope in it. It was the beginning of a no-hope day: miserably sunless, rough, with a full gale warning out for the Irish Sea and the sea itself looking like a place in which people were more likely to be found dead than alive.

  I was scared on my own account by this time. I didn’t want an RAF Nimrod flying low for me. Sleeplessness, and the constant bash and tumble of the water, was making me hallucinate, as people alone on small boats nearly always do. Robin Knox-Johnston, rounding Cape Horn, found himself engaged in a long conversation with his father-in-law, who was up in the crosstrees; Joshua Slocum had a ghostly pilot aboard; Naomi James came across an old friend who had stowed away in the chain locker. I was saddled with Commander King, the man who had taught me to handle the boat in Fowey. He kept on slamming the wheelhouse door behind me, and standing at my back. Every so often he coughed—a constrained, gentlemanly, naval cough that meant I was doing badly. Once, he pushed past me and went below.

  “Just checking the bilges,” he said. “Something you should have been doing at least every hour in a sea like this. Never mind.”

  I apologized out loud and kept on steering, leaving the bilges to the care of the Commander. Trying to rid myself of the hallucination, I set to wondering if I felt seasick. I had never yet been seasick, because of some defect of sensitivity in my inner ear, but always half-expected to be. I ticked off my symptoms: fright, shiveriness, dry mouth, lack of sleep, an anxiety that seemed rooted in the bowels, but hardly amounted to a real case of seasickness. This playing at doctors-and-nurses seemed to work. I was no longer being harassed by the spick-and-span Commander King.

  At seven o’clock I managed to coax the boat round the south side of Bardsey Island into Cardigan Bay. Shielded from the wind, the water here was like a ruffled lake in a civic park. I was able to set the autopilot, put on the kettle for morning coffee, smoke a pipe and sit at the chart table in fair comfort, reading the instructions for getting into the harbor at Pwllheli, while the radio over my head repeated the words South Stack, South Stack. It was clear that everyone thought the men on board must have been drowned long ago.

  I’d sailed two thousand miles to reach the Isle of Man. Fowey was still four hundred miles off, down the Irish Sea and round Land’s End. Yet I felt that I’d arrived at the place where the voyage really began—this insular, enclosed world with its 1950s cars and 1930s trains, where you could still spend half-crowns and seven-and-sixpences, where the long days dragged, where butterflies flopped about the country lanes in droves, where the men went about in their old trousers, where strangers were watched from behind curtains, and the eggs were fresh and the boredom stifling. I was indignant when I was mistaken for a comeover, because this, surely, was exactly where I’d spent my childhood: the Island was Home with a capital H—the home I’d always been running away from.
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  The parsonage was our island. The house was surrounded by a high wild hedge of privet, nettle, holly and blackthorn. No one ever thought of trying to tutor it with shears, and the hedge grew as tall as the trees; every year it encroached farther into the garden, swallowing old herbaceous borders as it came. On windy days, the tumultuous hedge rolled and broke like the sea.

  The invisible world beyond this hedge kept on changing: one year, there was a pallid brick council estate on the fringe of a city out there; the next, a Hampshire village with rustic thatch, an Oldest Inhabitant, and a Common of gorse and primroses, where you could find adders sinisterly coiled in the grass. But the hedge was the same hedge. It changed only with the weather. Sometimes there were whitecaps of honeysuckle on it; sometimes combers of bare twigs crackled in it like winter surf.

  Although the architecture of the house had a protean habit of sprouting an extra bedroom or two, then suddenly contracting again, the house itself remained as fundamentally unvarying as the hedge. It had been furnished not by my parents but by some dreadful personages whom we called The Ancestors. The Ancestors were our board of guardians. They provided the books on our shelves—Baker’s Sport in Bengal, the Royal Kalendar for 1832, Sermons by The Revd. W. Dunsleigh, the 1908 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a faded black platoon of Crockford’s Clerical Directories. The Ancestors had left us the krisses, kukris, dress swords and elephant bells which hung as ornaments on our walls. We had General Sir Edward’s medals nestling in rosy velvet in their glass case, the colored coat of arms which had been granted to some Ancestor or other for a bold piece of commercial sharp practice in the early nineteenth century, along with the Ancestors’ carriage clocks, games tables, antimacassars, aspidistra bowls, barometers, walking sticks, pincushions, samplers, crested silver and old shoes. The Ancestors themselves were there too—in miniature, on ovals of ivory, in cutout silhouette, in great slablike oil portraits framed with tousled gilt. Cousin Emma sat at her writing desk. The Recorder of Bombay wore his wig. The Suffragan Bishop of some other Asian outpost looked like an overdressed doll in his clerical furbelows and frills. Colonel William … George Caspar … Tom Priaulx … The Ancestors both outnumbered and outclassed us. So much cleverer, more adventurous and richer than we were ourselves, the Ancestors were our island heritage, our history, our men of yore, and we crept bashfully about in their long shadows.

  We ate our chopped meat and instant mashed potatoes off their plates with their silver cutlery; but most of their furniture was put out of bounds as too good to be spoiled by grubby contemporary fingers—fingers which had been blackened in the process of dutifully polishing the Ancestors’ rubbishy pieces of Benares brass. They were impossibly tough taskmasters, these Victorian half-pay officers and frowning clergymen and lawyers. My young father sat up late into the night working in their service, his inherited dog collar clipped over the top of his inherited shirt with its turned and darned cuffs.

  “Shush, dear—can’t you see that Daddy’s busy writing the Family Tree?”

  He lived—exactly as I do now—in a mess of papers. He wrote on file cards, on the backs of letters, in school exercise books, in ancestral ledgers. He had appointed himself official secretary to the Ancestors, and there was no Ancestor too obscure, no third cousin too far removed—my father took dictation from anyone in whose veins had flowed a single corpuscle of family blood. He gummed sheets of typing paper together and constructed a diagram almost the size of the drawing-room carpet. From a distance, it looked like a wild plumber’s jungle gym of gutterings and drainpipes. Close to, it was a forest of names, dates, arrows and = -signs. It might well have been a Renaissance cosmologist’s lifework, a plan of universal knowledge. It was a terrifying document. For what all the branches of the Family Tree—the seventeenth-century yeomen, the eighteenth-century tradesmen, the nineteenth-century gentry with all their fancy dress and swords and medals—boiled down to, on the bottom line, was me.

  It was no wonder that the space between the parsonage and the world beyond the hedge seemed oceanic. Our voluminous ancestry made us not so much a family as an entire race. We were not to be compared to people like the Whites, or the Beales, or even the Habershons, or the Hon. Kitty Brownlow; we were more like the Norsemen, or the Etruscans, or the Phoenicians, or the Manx. No one could possibly have as many ancestors as we did—and we were on first-name terms with the lot. Had we not been impoverished country cousins, we might have dared to drop the “General” and the “Sir” from Edward’s name, along with the “Colonel” from William’s, but our claims of relationship were proved; we were kinfolks to the great.

  There was good reason to believe that our clannish island was the very center of the world. God Himself had assured us of that, in so many words. If the Church Triumphant was at the heart of all things, then the Anglican parsonage was the living heart of the Church. My father’s study was the source of all moral and spiritual authority in the world as we knew it. He was the births, marriages and deaths man. His ex cathedra statements on politics, social matters, sexual conduct were—it went without saying—the next-best thing that you could get to God’s own opinions on these subjects. It’s true that there was an impostor living in Pound Road who ran what my father called the “tin tabernacle,” also a vagrant Irish priest in the pay of Rome. At various times, as the landscape beyond the hedge shifted, there were Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons, Pentecostalists, Primitive Methodists and people who talked to the dead via planchettes on ouija boards. But no decent or sensible person would get involved with such superstitious lunacies: this was England, we were the Church of England, and that was that.

  My father, with his parson’s freehold, was our Governor, and he held his office under Royal patent. When visitors from the outside world came to the parsonage, they came as if they’d made a sea crossing to reach us. As comeovers should do, they arrived looking formal, shy and ill at ease.

  There would be the scrunch of bicycle tires in the gravel, then an unnatural period of silence, then a ring at the doorbell.

  “Oh, drat, not another parishioner,” my mother said.

  “Can you answer it, dear—”

  “Are you Out or In?”

  “I don’t know. See who it is, will you, dear?”

  “They really might have the grace not to come at this time—don’t they ever think?”

  But at the door, my mother would say “Oh, Mrs. Beale! Lovely to see you. How are you? Do come in!”

  A dozen people a day would beach at our door like this. Skulking at the top of the stairs, I watched them with a cold and curious eye—the speechless couples, engaged to be married; the white faces of the bereaved, who always apologized for being there, as if death were an error they should have been able to correct; the loud deserted wives; the unmarried mothers-to-be, shielding their pregnancies like disfigurements; gruff men in bicycle clips who were sorry-to-bother-the-vicar-but; and elderly lone gentlewomen for whom the parsonage was the last remaining place where they could pay a social call. Lingering as near as I dared to the closed door of the study, I heard voices lowered as if the house itself were a church. Sometimes I heard grownup women crying. My father’s voice was wise and even-toned. Its slow, bass seriousness was what people needed when they came to a parsonage; it promised understanding, help and religious mystery.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes … yes.” But there was much more than that. Framed by his own Ancestors, by the institution of the Church, by his unusual personal proximity to the Creator, my father had a great deal of what Victorian writers called “bottom.” His yeses came from the depths; each monosyllable was a low rumble of compassionate assent. A yes from my father would stop a crying woman in her tracks or release a sudden bright cascade of words in the week-old widower. When the parishioners emerged from his study, they looked comforted and changed. I scowled and kept my own counsel about these transformations: I was unimpressible, as islanders are, by another islander’s achievements.

  There were w
hacking financial differentials between the parsonage and the outside world. At about £700 a year, a vicar’s stipend in the 1950s was roughly the same as the wage of a skilled laborer living on the council estate outside. It was a small fraction of the pensions of the real live retired generals who lived in big houses on the outskirts of the village, let alone of the incomes of the people with double-barreled surnames, the directors of London companies, the doctor, the farmers or the rest of the comfortable middling classes. We belonged nowhere. We had the money of one lot, the voices of another—and we had an unearthly godliness which removed us from the social map altogether.

  So we learned to exploit our own insularity. Wherever we went abroad, we were strangers, but we were very knowing strangers. Out on his rounds, my father was always trying to colonize new tracts of social territory for the Church; these Raleigh-like voyages of exploration and conquest would, when successful, be followed by a larger landing party from the parsonage. It was a precarious empire: promising colonies kept on declaring independence and dropping out of the arrangement, but at any one time we would have a footing in the council houses, the bungalows, the old people’s flats, the cottages and the big places with drives and rhododendrons.

  By the age of twelve I had become expert at every deadly English deference and snobbery. On the estate, I learned to praise all those things which I secretly knew it was correct to scorn: flights of china ducks going full throttle up the wall, overfed and molting cats, plastic three-piece suites, pictures made of bits of old clocks, the new television set with the Radio Times in a special imitation-leather folder, paper doilies for putting cups of tea on, pots of cacti on the windowsill and the electric logs in the grate.